Memory Theatre

Simon Critchley

Publisher: Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2014
Genre: Non-Fiction
Pages: 88 pages

A French philosopher dies during a savage summer heat wave. Boxes carrying his unpublished miscellany mysteriously appear in Simon Critchley’s office. Rooting through piles of papers, Critchley discovers a brilliant text on the ancient art of memory and a cache of astrological charts predicting the deaths of various philosophers. Among them is a chart for Critchley himself, laying out in great detail the course of his life and eventual demise. Becoming obsessed with the details of his fate, Critchley receives the missing, final box, which contains a maquette of Giulio Camillo’s sixteenth-century Venetian memory theatre, a space supposed to contain the sum of all knowledge. That’s when the hallucinations begin…

‘Memory Theatre is a brilliant one-of-a-kind mind-game occupying a strange frontier between philosophy, memoir and fiction. Simon Critchley beguiles as he illuminates.’

David Mitchell, author of The Bone Clocks

Simon Critchley

Simon Critchley is Hans Jonas Professor of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research in New York. His previous books include On Humour, The Book of Dead Philosophers, How to Stop Living and Start Worrying, Impossible Objects, The Mattering of Matter (with Tom McCarthy), The Faith of the Faithless, Stay, Illusion!: The Hamlet Doctrine (with Jamieson Webster), Bowie, and Notes on Suicide (also published by Fitzcarraldo Editions). He is series moderator of ‘The Stone’, a philosophy column in the New York Times, to which he is a frequent contributor.

Simon Critchley

Notes on Suicide

2015

Memory Theatre

Simon Critchley

Simon Critchley

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Simon Critchley